Center for Italian Philosophy, Accademia Vivarum Novum
Villa Falconieri, December 19, 2024
New Science and Modernity, a Study of Knowledge, History, and Language in Gian Battista Vico by Paloma Brook, Aracne. Rome 2024: Suggestions for the Discussion and Speech by Professor Pasquale Giustiniani
Dear Aldo and Luigi,
in view of the CFI Conference on Italic Philosophy, I would like to offer some suggestions that could be forwarded to the scholars who will be invited.
The Conference could be titled “Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia”.
In light of Giambattista Vico's writing - De antiquissima italorum sapientia -, the Conference intends to critically examine the ancient Greek, Christian and late-ancient premises of what Vico considered "our metaphysics", published by him in 1710 to "arouse curiosity in the learned" and, in particular, to "benefit the youth", explaining things from the first terms, weighing the opinions of others, showing all the consequences, up to the last corollaries.
In the horizon described, the critical approach of each scholar-speaker should keep in mind some main questions:
1. What is the "state of the art" of the critical interpretations of the thought of the author(s) that is investigated today?
2. Are there premises or original nuclei of developments that will occur in the philosophy elaborated later in Italy?
3. On which points should we insist to benefit the young generations of middle-high school and university students?
Paloma Brook, New Science and Modernity: A Study of Knowledge, History and Language in Giambattista Vico, Preface by Stefano Velotti, Edizioni Aracne, Rome 2024, pages 191.
From the opening lines of the Introduction (pages 19 to 26), the Author warns the reader about her research work, which aims to add a further piece to the studies on Giambattista Vico: a work «Ambitious because it aspires to investigate the idea of ​​new science in the light of a more general interpretative hypothesis: Vico is a philosopher of modernity in that he elaborates a form of thought that understands itself as placed in a now, in a present» (from the Introduction, page 19). This is a “modernity” according to the four indications of Günter Figal (see page 20), not without his resumptions made in the studies of Stefano Velotti (who also signs the preface to this volume (pages 13 to 16) and of Gianfranco Cantelli, for whom the «modern is a horizon, a perspective that includes in itself the present and the non-present, that is, the past and the future» (page 20): a horizon whose aspects outlined by Figal are: opposition, positioning, value judgment, horizon. Compared to the “past”, the New Science itself «consciously recognizes and constructs itself in contrast with the past» (page 21), opening up the possibility of noting both the fracture with respect to the past and of understanding its own present and itself, precisely by undertaking a new science. In this sense, the New Science «is not (or is not only) to be understood as a discipline, a science or a method alongside others, with the intent of providing a series of doctrines on the origins, the myth, poetry, history and their distance from the present» (page 22), but it is also a critical turning point, typical of the “modernity” of the eighteenth century. Hence the moments of the volume, which is divided «into three fundamental parts – plus a fourth part intended as a conclusion» (page 24). And here, as we read in the first Chapter (pages 27 to 51), Vico is not only a mere continuator of the philological-linguistic turning point of Humanism, nor is he to be seen as «the forerunner of many theories developed in the two subsequent centuries» (page 27). He manifests and implements, as Brooke observes, the will for a break with the past, made, textually, of “wreck” (page 29), and, at the same time, the pride of having to fulfill a new philosophical task with his science» (page 28). The subject of this new construction can be read in the important paragraph 338, in the fourth section On the method, which the Author enunciates in the first Chapter and then takes up again in paragraph 1 of the second chapter, where a fundamental discontinuity with respect to previous knowledge is enunciated (page 32), that is, a merciless criticism, or a series of refutations of the arrogance of nations and the arrogance of scholars, that is, of the knowledge that preceded it, not only the philological one, including the metaphysical instance, in the name of the hermeneutic criterion of discrepancy rather than continuity (see page 41). Vico is not an anti-modern, «entirely tied to the certainties of a humanistic vision (and, even before, a theological-metaphysical one) that is based on the bond of continuity between past and present» (pages 43 to 44). Compared to Cartesian modernity, Vico's modernity aims to «rediscover in what appears and is definitively lost what that ever-present, that non-past that still acts, as part of our common human mind» (page 42). In this horizon, the notion of Providence «is called to understand precisely this connection and to answer the question: if history cannot be understood by reconstructing the intentions of those who act in it, how can we give rationality to that which at first sight does not demonstrate it?» (page 43). It is not an archaic and non-modern connection to theological tradition, insists the Author; rather, «the concept of providence must be read as a corrective to a rationalistic and voluntaristic idea of ​​history» (page 43). On the one hand, will and rationality are not sufficient to explain certain effects on the plane of history: «Providence, it has been said, is therefore not “vulgar metaphysics”, in that it does not intervene directly on events, but makes use of “free” human action, with all its limits» (page 45). On the other hand, in line with a Vico of the opposite sign, of rationalist and enlightened mold: «it is man who makes history, not an intelligent divine plan, a supernatural intervention» (page 47).
Brooke's entire research is a pursuit, page after page, of this apparent contrast between the previous vision of a world born from a mind different and superior to the human one (which has its own specific purposes, such as the ironic one) and that of a human subject producing history: first a theological instance transcending the world, not without residues of the «Christian tradition that intends history as the history of salvation and therefore as a reflection of intelligent design»: page 47, number 49): subsequently – here is the second chapter (page 53), a “theory” which is the New Science starting from the 1725 edition, but with textual revivals in 1744, or a «science, which develops as epistème, but also and above all as a new critical art» (page 54), as proof of a «component of meta-reflection at the basis of its theoretical procedure» (page 55, number 3) and, therefore, with an essential role played by the human mind. It is in this sense that Vico fulfills «a specific task of modernity: that of having to account for the conditions of possibility of our way of knowing the world, of our symbolic elaboration of it, and at the same time, even if only implicitly, define its limits» (page 57). It is a search for principles - to be found in fact among the modifications of our human thought, not without understanding them as chronological beginnings, as “facts” materialized in altars, weddings and burials. Here are «the two levels of theory (the new science with its principles) and of the object of the theory (humanity at its dawn), and the symptom of that fundamental circularity of a science that has itself as its object» (page 65). «The principles that Vico means are first of all principles of the human mind common to all nations (it is a sort of “universalism”, which must be clarified in its meaning and consequences» (page 66). The Author observes: «It is one of the many theoretical oppositions, even antinomies, that cross and almost constitute the troubled path of Vico's thought, within which it moves and which it tries to include in a broader critical reflection» (page 67). Vico is not so much a predecessor of the historical consciousness of the 19th century: «The New Science can be seen as the last stage where the philosopher displays the gallery of historical facts and characters, with their myths, laws, institutions, but also irrationalities, follies and inconsistencies: nevertheless trying to understand them rationally by grasping their deep structures» (page 70). Hence a new relationship between verum et factum: «they represent… two distinct and in some ways opposed functions, where it is one, there is no other» (page 71), which are understood in the light of a regulative principle, or rather a regulative ideal (compare page 72), «only orientative and very general, which still says nothing about the specific facts of the past» (page 73)
Pasquale Giustiniani